Central Piedmont Community College is very different from the school that opened 50 years ago.

The Charlotte-based community college got its start in the Central High building in 1963. It was an experiment of sorts, with roughly 1,000 students enrolled in the first semester, notes Tony Zeiss, college president.

Today, the college has six campuses and numerous other sites where it offers classes. If part-time students and work-force programs are included, enrollment totals about 70,000 students a year.

Zeiss estimates more than 1.5 million students have been served during the past 50 years.

The college fills a niche providing college credit classes, certificates and degrees as well as work-force training to provide employees with critical skills. CPCC also plays a key role in economic development, helping entice companies to choose Charlotte, Zeiss adds.

“So we not only keep those jobs here, but we attract new jobs as those companies expand,” he says.

Zeiss recently spoke with the Charlotte Business Journal. Following are edited excerpts.

How do you expect CPCC will evolve moving forward?

First of all, we’re concentrating on success. We’re an open-door college, but sometimes we’ve been a revolving door. We’re working hard to try to retain students and help them get through more quickly so they’re successful. We think the truest measure of our success is if our students are successful in getting a job in the career in which they train. For us to do that, we’ve got to be able to produce the very best programs for where the jobs are. That’s another thing that we follow. We put an emphasis on where the jobs are. We don’t keep degrees in fields where the job are no longer there. We try to be relevant.

What type of growth is in CPCC’s future?

As Mecklenburg County grows and we recruit more jobs, we just have to have more people trained. So we’re working more closely with the high schools than ever before and also with the universities. We realize education is a continuum. It’s not in silos anymore. We have to work together to leverage each other’s resources to help people get skills they need to be independent and have good quality of life, but also to produce greater prosperity for all. We will be growing.

You held a global competitiveness summit this month. Why is it important for Charlotte to compete on a global level?

One thing we lack in our area, in our Charlotte region, is we don’t have a clear consensus on what our economic vision is. If you take a look at Charlotte’s assets and where we think we need to be 10, 20, 30 years down the road, it’s very clear that’s the direction we need to go. If we don’t seize this opportunity to become more global in our thinking — if we don’t do it now — it’s going to stymie the growth of our economy for years to come. The key is to get everyone in the region to begin thinking that way. And as we think larger, we will export more, we will bring more dollars and jobs back into our economy and Charlotte can continue to grow and be prosperous.

You’re in the midst of a $30 million fundraising campaign. Is funding the biggest challenge?

I would say, yes, the biggest challenge is always financial support. It’s a struggle to keep up with the growth and the needs. We’re the largest (N.C.)community college so we get the least amount per student, yet the teacher student ratios are the same. We’re up 35% in enrollment since 2007, but we’re down 25% in funding. We’re very entrepreneurial. We’re not wringing our hands and yelping about it because we know there’s only so much money to go around. We’ve just got to help ourselves as much as possible. We decided we have to do something because a lot of students need scholarships. We need more equipment to keep up with state of the art. We don’t get enough equipment from the legislature. We can’t expect taxpayers to keep increasing taxes.